Faith Healing

When I was in the ministry, the focus of my ministry for four years was deliverance, but towards the last year of my ministry many were trying to push me toward faith healing. It seemed that every church I visited a so called prophet would call me up to the altar and tell me that god wanted me to heal the sick and that I had been anointed to do so by the holy spirit.

One of the things I found to be very disheartening in the church was that they were a bunch of miracle mongers. If you sat through a service and then the evangelist or preacher began praying for people and they began passing out, the whole church would run to the altar for a touch of the divine. This is ironic coming from a religion that emphasizes faith and not sight. 

Even as an evangelist I was always skeptical about faith healing. I never believed the miracle stories that would float around the congregation from time to time. In fact, a miracle loses all its validity in my opinion if the recipient of the miracle is unknown to you. When Jesus supposedly healed some demoniac from possession the first thing he told him was to go show himself to those in town so that they may see what god had done.

I personally believe that alot of the so called ailments cured in faith healing crusades are nothing more than psychosomatic disorders. You never hear of an amputee miraculously grow a leg back, or a dead person being brought  back from the dead. Plenty of faith healers make the claim that they have raised people from the dead but I have yet to see one do it.

I think that faith healing does more harm than good most of the time. I personally knew someone from my church that died because he was afraid to have surgery for a hernia and put all his faith in Jesus that he would one day miraculously be healed. I felt bad for the masses that were putting their lives at risk believing that their good lord would heal them, and I did not want to be responsible for anyone's death.

I prayed for the sick on rare occasions but I did not advocate faith healing, it should be called faith killing because that is exactly what it is. People shun medical treatment in place of faith and end up dying for the silliest infirmities simply because they wanted a touch of heaven. The believers that suffered from psychosomatic disorders were the only ones healed but their ailment was in their minds. I have more to say on this and so I will follow up on the next post.